Tears of Frost

by Bree Barton

  Back then Pilar only saw the good. She had a knack for plucking the peppermint candy from a box of shit. As she grew up, the shit began to outsmell the peppermint.

  Your father did not want you.

  When I told him you were his, he left.

  “I want to find him, Mother,” she’d declared at fifteen.

  “He would kill you in an instant.”

  “If he kills Dujia, why didn’t he kill you?”

  There was a small hope Pilar didn’t want to give voice to: that her mother was lying. Zaga lied about everything else. Why not this? Maybe the Snow Wolf hadn’t known she was pregnant.

  Maybe, if he’d known, he wouldn’t have left.

  And then, during her months disguised as a scullery maid in Kaer Killian, Pilar finally had a chance to do some digging of her own.

  One of the Hunters had taken a shine to her. A clumsy, slobbering Luumi boy with a blond beard more like blond fuzz. Every night while he angled for a kiss, she barraged him with questions about the renowned Dujia killer.

  Few people had ever seen the Snow Wolf—accounts of his appearance varied wildly—but it had to be him. The boy described his fighting technique as “a blade forged from water, mercurial and deadly.” Some skills were trainable, but Orry said you either had good instincts or you didn’t. Instincts were something a warrior girl might inherit from her warrior father—even one she’d never met.

  “Since you’re so keen to find him,” her slobbering Luumi suitor had said, “go to the Snow Queen’s palace the last night of Jyöl. The Wolf won’t let anyone see his face, but he stands on the steps of the palace, cloaked and masked, beneath the Weeping Moon.”

  The boy had carved “Snow Wolf” on the back of a silver coin and dropped it down the front of Pilar’s scullery dress, hoping to curry favor.

  He’d curried nothing but a fat lip.

  During the darkest days in the Kaer, when the enkindlement cut into Pilar’s mind like glass, the coin kept her sane. She would channel all her energy into her fingers, fight Angelyne’s magic long enough to reach into her pocket and trace her father’s name.

  Pilar knew he was a Dujia killer. But then, so was she.

  Maybe, if she found him, he would listen.

  Maybe he would believe.

  “I understand now.”

  Quin’s voice jolted Pilar back to the present. His face was soft. “I wish you’d told me.”

  Her stomach twisted. How much had she revealed just now, lost in her own memories? She scraped the emotion off her face.

  “Why would I tell you? It doesn’t change anything.”

  “It changes everything. You’re not looking for a killer. You’re looking for your father.”

  “I’m looking for a killer,” she snapped, “who happens to be my father. I need his help if I want to kill my mother. No more than that.”

  “And after you kill your mother? What will you do once you’ve claimed your vengeance?”

  Whenever Pilar tried to see beyond the moment Zaga’s heart stopped, her vision clouded.

  “Be honest, Pilar,” Quin said. “You want to find your father so you’re not alone.”

  She hated the way he was looking at her, like she was something to be pitied.

  “You don’t know anything about me.”

  “I know you’re not being honest about what you want. Not with me, not with yourself.”

  “I am not a liar,” she spat. “And I’m not a coward. At least I’m running toward something. Your kingdom is in shambles, piles of dead bodies stacked in your castle, and you’re running away. Poor little prince, scared of magic. Scared of frozen lakes. Scared of everything.”

  She could tell she’d hurt him. It made her feel like a clawed beast, unable to do anything but gouge and skewer.

  “No one wants to be alone,” he said.

  She bit the inside of her cheek, eyes blurring with salt. She wasn’t searching for the Snow Wolf for a rosy family portrait or a warm hug. How could she make Quin understand?

  “I’ve always been alone,” she said. “Always will be.”

  Pilar shook the tears out of her eyes. “I can’t save my family, Killian. There’s none to save. And I can’t save yours, either. Not your sister, not Mia Rose. I sure as four hells can’t save you.”

  “Maybe I’m not the one who needs saving.”

  She didn’t have time for a retort. Outside the kabma, four wheels smashed into the snow.

  “One carriage, three riders on horseback.”

  Quin had peeled back a flap of reinsdyr hide to peek out the kabma’s window. Pilar stood at his side. The crest on the carriage matched the one on her coin: a silver ice leopard standing proudly on a white flower. When the flag rippled in the breeze, the leopard looked like he was slinking forward, ready to pounce.

  “We were supposed to go unnoticed.” Pilar scanned the kabma. No bulky furniture to conceal them—just straw beds and a round wood table. Four bright red cloaks with high metal collars hung from hooks on the wall.

  Only then did she notice the drawings. Dozens of them. They were tacked to the wall—some charcoal, some stained with pigment.

  She stepped closer, and her foot knocked into something hard. She’d kicked open a dented violin case. When she leaned down to close it, she saw a white trinket nested inside.

  Pilar lifted the trinket from the pink satin.

  A frostflower carved from bleached bone.

  On instinct, she dropped it down the front of her shirt. She wasn’t sure why.

  The carriage wheels creaked to a halt outside. Pilar heard the thud of a rider dismount. A woman’s deep, coarse voice pierced the kabma’s ice walls.

  “Foe or friend?”

  “Friend,” Pilar called. “Two friends.”

  Together she and Quin stepped out of the kabma.

  Three women stood in the snow in a perfect triangle, axes slung over their backs. They wore thick furs and snow-fox cloaks. The tallest had bright silver eyes, black hair shaved close to the scalp, and the same cool amber skin as the little boy, only without the freckles. The other two were light-skinned, with crystal blue eyes and long white-blond hair tied up in braids and knots.

  The women were older than Pilar—twenty-five, maybe thirty. She wasn’t good at guessing that sort of thing. There was something compelling about the way they stood with their feet wide on the earth, their shoulders squared. They were big women, and they seemed proud of their size, comfortable with their strength. Pilar instantly admired them.

  “Your voice is mighty,” said the woman with the shaved head, thin silver eyes flashing with amusement, “yet you are small.”

  “You are big,” Pilar countered, “yet your ax is tiny.”

  The woman laughed. “I think I’m going to like you.” She fixed her gaze on the prince. “What brings you to the Luumi border?”

  Quin shifted his weight. “Unfinished business.”

  “I wasn’t aware the river prince had any business in the land of snow.”

  So she knew who he was. Pilar couldn’t tell if the shaved-head woman, who seemed to be the leader of the guards, was about to clap Quin on the back or hack his head off his shoulders.

  A small crowd had begun to gather. Many wore the same bright red cloak that hung inside the kabma, twisted pewter at the neck and a thick white belt at the waist. Others wore reinsdyr pelts and boots made of tanned hide.

  In the gray fog, Pilar saw a row of ice kabmas and what looked like a village square. So her instincts were right. This was an Addi village.

  The Addi watched the guardswomen, curious, maybe a little afraid.

  “Check inside,” said the shaved-head guard, waving toward the kabma at Pilar and Quin’s backs. The two other guardswomen hurried forward and threw the door open.

  Pilar’s stomach dropped. She knew what they would find inside.

  “It isn’t what you think,” she began, but it was too late.

  “Another one, Freyja,” called one of the gua
rds. “This time a boy.”

  The smile vanished from Freyja’s face. She pushed roughly past them, crouched beside the boy’s small body. Pilar saw her take his hand gently. She was checking for a pulse.

  “We found him by the lake,” Quin said nervously. “We tried to revive him . . .”

  Freyja stood. “Bind them.”

  The bigger of the two blond guards seized Quin with one hand. The smaller guard pinned Pilar’s arms behind her back. Pilar bent her knees and shifted her weight forward, ready to fight—just as her captor slammed her boot down, crushing her foot.

  Pilar swallowed a cry of pain. A broken toe. Maybe two. Her head swam as the guardswoman twisted her arm harder, then reached down and drew Pilar’s dagger from her boot.

  “So that’s it, then?” She fought to keep her voice even. “We’re your prisoners now? In Luumia, land of warm welcomes?”

  “You’re certainly not our friends.”

  Freyja extracted a piece of black chalk from her pouch and drew a large circle on the door of the ice kabma. She slashed through it with three long lines, making a wheel with six spokes. On the end of each spoke she drew three short dashes.

  A murmur rippled through the crowd. This symbol meant something to the people in the village.

  Freyja tucked the black chalk into her trouser pocket.

  “Lord Dove?”

  For the first time Pilar noticed a thin older man sat stooped on the carriage, swathed in such heavy cloaks she could only see his rosy cheeks and the pink tip of his nose.

  “What would you recommend?” said Freyja.

  “Yes, well, I suppose . . .” Lord Dove rubbed his hands together. He seemed out of place, a gentleman stuck between three rough-and-tumble women. “We really have no choice, do we? She’ll want to see them.”

  “Who will?” Quin asked.

  Freyja turned and looked at them evenly.

  “The queen.”

  21 Days Till the Weeping Moon

  Beloved sister,

  My last letter was a lie.

  Aren’t all good stories like that? As children we are taught that fairy tales are lies dressed up as truths. I think it’s the opposite. The best stories are true tales masquerading as fictions. Beautifully crafted, honest lies.

  There once was an Addi witch. She had soft skin and long hair that flowed down her back like spun silver. The witch lived alone in an ice kabma at the foot of a mountain. When she grew hungry during the long winters, she wandered closer to the villages to find food.

  But the people in the village did not trust her. “A witch will always have a taste for human flesh,” they said. “You cannot change your nature.” In truth the witch preferred a nice lamb stew to human children, but the rumors clung to her like burs to cloth.

  Some of the men took a liking to her dark brown eyes and silken hair. While their wives chipped ice from the frozen lakes or kneaded bread dough in the kitchen, the men stole through the forest to find the witch and propose a trade. “We will give you food,” they said, “if you give us something first.”

  So the witch gave them what they wanted. She ate the warm food. She bore six children. They were half human, half witch. Sometimes she wondered which half were the monsters.

  But she loved them fiercely, because this is what mothers do: they love their children, even the most monstrous parts.

  The witch grew old. The long years bowed her spine and drew her flesh gently toward the earth. One cold winter, on the night the Weeping Moon rose like a teardrop in the sky, she came to find food for her children, only to have the villagers spit in her face. Even the littlest boys yanked the thinning gray hair from her scalp and called her an old hag. When she fought back, they strung her up in the village square where only mice and crows were there to hear her last breath.

  No one knows what happened to her children, if they died from cold or starvation, or if the villagers came for them, committed atrocities too horrible to name. They vanished from the world, preserved only in memories, in ink. But they cast long shadows on those who survived them.

  Today the witch is known as the First Soul. She and her six children are the Seven Souls of Jyöl. They live on in the legends of Luumia, a land that has emerged from these macabre beginnings to become a glittering beacon of progress and equality for all.

  I have always wanted to see the festival. I do so love a good holiday! The Illuminations of old were a wondrous thing, until Luumia was plunged into darkness twenty years ago, a consequence of greed and an abiding lust for power. But there are murmurings of strange things afoot. They say the Illuminations have returned under the new Snow Queen; that the lights will once again ignite the night sky. My interest in these lights—and their mysterious origins—runs deep.

  But alas, I must stay here, righting the wrongs of this broken land while you draw nearer to the land of promise.

  My men tell me you will arrive just as the moon begins to weep. Buy me a festive purple scarf and bring it home, would you? I like to keep Mother’s moonstone warm around my throat.

  I will see you very, very soon.

  With affection,

  Angelyne

  Chapter 8

  Dead

  MIA WAS DRUNK.

  She slumped in a cozy booth at the alehouse, counting her fingers. Her hands had sprouted more than she remembered.

  She was five nips of vaalkä in, maybe six. Honestly? After four they all blurred together. The thing about vaalkä was that it tasted of nutmeg and warm apple pie, served with a salty slab of butter at the bottom of the glass. Quite comforting until it landed in your belly with enough heat to set your spleen on fire.

  Or so they told her. She couldn’t taste the nutmeg—couldn’t feel the heat, even if her body clearly showed the aftereffects.

  “What you have to remember,” droned her companion, a tall boy with white-blond hair and watery blue eyes, “is that sorcery used to be a man’s game. In the Luumia of old, only men were sorcerers. Things were better then, before we were at the mercy of the witch women.”

  Charming. Mia had made it all the way to White Lagoon, the first town on Luumia’s northern coast, where she stood (slumped, rather) in a land shimmering with parity—and she’d managed to find a boy just as parochial as the ones she’d left behind.

  “Sorcery is the u-u-use of magic,” she said, her vowels slurring more than she would have liked. “Not magic itself. Perhaps ye olde sorcerers tapped into a magic that didn’t belong to them.”

  “Ah. So you’re one of those.” He swilled his barley ale and chewed it noisily. “The girls who blame us men for ruining everything.”

  “From where I sit, history usually favors the ones with the cocks.”

  “And here I thought you were a lady.” He stroked his mustache, which looked like a wormy white eyebrow pasted over his mouth. If Mia gave it a good hard tug, would it peel off?

  “You’re in support of the petition, then,” he said. “The bid to change our official name from the kingdom of Luumia to the queendom.”

  The word rolled around Mia’s head. Queendom. She liked the sound of it.

  “You do have a queen.”

  “And what happens to centuries of tradition? To our rich heritage? I’m not going to let some self-righteous witches strip me of my rights.”

  Mia yawned. The grin slid off his face.

  “Am I boring you?”

  “Intolbery.” She tried again. “Intolerably.”

  “If you don’t want to talk, we could do other things. There are rooms for rent upstairs.”

  “Also there are rats. But I won’t be consorting with them, either.”

  She was brilliant when drunk, if she did say so herself. For most people, liquor pulped the words to mush in their mouths. For Mia it was the opposite. A nip of spirits removed all inhibitions. Vaalkä gifted her with a tongue of fire.

  Albeit sloppy fire.

  “Playing hard to get, are you?” He slid a tick closer on the bench. “I like that.�
�

  She felt a heavy thud on her kneecap. For a moment she thought she’d dropped her nip of vaalkä—a veritable calamity, seeing as how she was almost out of coins.

  But it wasn’t her spirits. Mia looked down to see the boy’s hand on her knee. He’d somehow found the gap between the bottom of her cropped trousers and the top of her socks, peeled back the fabric and splayed his fingers like a sweaty starfish on her skin.

  She couldn’t feel the sweat, the heat, the groping.

  She couldn’t feel much of anything at all.

  Mia had woken in a box.

  It still gave her nightmares, that first moment. Awakening from the dark into the dark. She hadn’t known where she was until she reached up to brush the hair out of her face and her knuckles cracked against hard wood.

  Mia couldn’t breathe. She was choking, stale air clogging her throat. She cracked her knuckles again, and again, and again, punching at the invisible roof until eventually she found the seam with her fingernails and pried the box open. Only after she’d tumbled out of her coffin, the cartilage in her knees stiff as cold caramel, had she seen the blood smeared across her knuckles, the splintered wood clinging to broken flesh.

  She knew then that something was wrong. A thread between mind and body had been severed; a loss of language from her senses to her brain, and from her brain to her senses.

  Mia’s body had become a shell. She couldn’t taste flavors or smell scents. Couldn’t feel heat or cold, pain or discomfort—and not pleasure, either. Though she was vaguely aware of her feet on the floor or her hand lifting a glass of spirits, they were more like dull thuds, echoes of sensation. She’d gone numb.

  It wasn’t only physical. When she forced herself to drink, laugh, and be merry, she felt even more a fraud. It exhausted her, pretending to be normal.

  That was the one thing she did still feel. Bone-deep weariness. A cloak no one else could see.

  It would appear that dying came at a cost.

  Her memories of the days leading up to the wooden box oozed through her like wet fog. She knew Zaga and Angelyne had betrayed her. She knew she’d killed Princess Karri while trying to save her. Most of all, she knew she’d left Prince Quin behind. She had the same nightmare over and over: a terrified Quin screaming her name.